Archive for the ‘Reviews’ Category
Tuesday, April 5th, 2022
I only paid attention to THE SOLDIER (1982) because I noticed it had a score by Tangerine Dream. (Turns out to be a good one, too, though hard to find as an album.) I should’ve checked it out anyway just because it’s written and directed by James Glickenhaus between THE EXTERMINATOR and THE PROTECTOR. It’s a little more normal and less sleazy than those – it’s a covert ops movie in the mold of THE KILLER ELITE or SWORD OF GIDEON or one of those – but I think I liked it even better.
Ken Wahl (THE DIRTY DOZEN: THE NEXT MISSION, THE GLADIATOR) plays the titular The Soldier. That’s his code name! Seems like there could be some misunderstandings there. He leads an elite counterterrorism unit that operates completely off the books and answers only to the head of the CIA (Ron Harper, BODY COUNT, PEARL HARBOR). And they’re introduced in a pretty funny way. In the first shot, a limo carrying an ambassador is driving through Philadelphia and an old lady – well, a woman wearing an old lady costume – crosses in front of her with a babycart. The driver doesn’t even slow down, just nails the woman and keeps going. A woman with a shopping bag, a construction worker and a businessman all see it happen and come running over, to find the lady dead. Inside the babycart is a doll and an uzi. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Alberta Watson, James Glickenhaus, Jeremiah Sullivan, Joaquim de Almeida, Ken Wahl, Klaus Kinski, Peter Hooten, Ron Harper, Steve James, Tangerine Dream, William Prince
Posted in Action, Reviews | 12 Comments »
Monday, April 4th, 2022
WILD ZERO (1999) is something that I was aware of as a major cult movie twenty-some years ago, but I never got around to seeing it until now. So young people, please ignore that first sentence and pretend this is an impressive find on my part.
I remembered it because I watched that Japanese post-apocalyptic punk movie BURST CITY not too long ago. WILD ZERO is very different, but it’s another crazed genre movie starring rowdy Japanese rock ’n’ rollers who play music and get into trouble. A trio called Guitar Wolf (led by Guitar Wolf, backed up by Bass Wolf and Drum Wolf), who play a garage rock style they call “jet rock ’n’ roll,” star as themselves in a goofy zombie/sci-fi movie. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Guitar Wolf, Japanese punk, zombies
Posted in Music, Reviews, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 8 Comments »
Friday, April 1st, 2022
“Listen, Annie’s parents were killed for a piece of plastic pizza. I want you guys to just stay home and not get hurt.”
If you’re like me, you’re very excited for Michelle Yeoh’s new movie EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE, which is in a platform release right now in the U.S. (I’m gonna see it tomorrow, some cities are getting it next Friday). And if you know about that movie you may also know it co-stars Ke Huy Quan, formerly known as Jonathan Ke Quan. He’s a superstar to anyone who was a kid in the ’80s, because he played Short Round in INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM and Data in THE GOONIES. But after that he worked more sporadically than he wanted. He’s American, born in Vietnam, but he did a few movies in Taiwan, Japan and Hong Kong, while his most prominent Hollywood roles were a season of Head of the Class and a small part in ENCINO MAN.
He left the business in the early 2000s, but the success of CRAZY RICH ASIANS inspired him to try again, and right away he got to play Michelle Yeoh’s husband! Good for him. His return inspired me to finally check out a movie I’d been curious about for years, BREATHING FIRE (1991), because it’s his only previous English language martial arts movie, and very much the kind of chintzy low budget b-movie I enjoy. Atrocious dialogue and acting, convoluted-to-nonsensical story, but lots of laughs, training montages and pretty cool Hong Kong style fights. A fun time. To give you an idea, the DVD I rented was a double feature with a dubbed Bruce Li vehicle called EDGE OF FURY, and the cover pretends like Bolo Yeung (who plays one of the bad guys and is credited as “Bolo Young”) is the star. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Bolo Yeung, Ed Neil, Jerry Trimble, Jonathan Ke Quan, Laura Hamilton, Paul Hertzog, T.J. Storm, Tan Tao-Liang
Posted in Action, Martial Arts, Reviews | 4 Comments »
Thursday, March 31st, 2022
X is the new horror picture from writer/director Ti West, his first movie since the 2016 western IN A VALLEY OF VIOLENCE. The fastest way I know to describe it is “what if THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE was BOOGIE NIGHTS?” It takes place in 1979 and it’s about a group of people from Houston who decide to make their first porno movie, and rent a small house on a remote farm to film it. In the process, their strong sexual content, graphic nudity, drug use and language is met with strong bloody violence and gore.
That’s from the actual MPAA rating, but it’s misleading. Though X is hardly tame, it doesn’t strike me as particularly extreme either. You gotta say this in hushed tones in these parts, but this is West’s first collaboration with A24, and I would consider him one of the pioneers of the style of 21st century slow burn horror that has become one of that company’s trademarks. I enjoyed his movies THE HOUSE OF THE DEVIL and THE INNKEEPERS, from 2009 and 2011, before A24 existed. This is in a similar vein, but being a slasher movie it’s a little more generous in its pay off, so I enjoyed it too. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: A24, Brittany Snow, Jenna Ortega, Kid Cudi, Martin Henderson, Mia Goth, Owen Campbell, slashers, Stephen Ure, Ti West
Posted in Reviews | 17 Comments »
Tuesday, March 29th, 2022
When I realized the upcoming Michael Bay joint AMBULANCE was a remake of a 2005 Danish movie, I figured that meant it was probly a pretty good high concept film. The last time Jake Gyllenhaal starred in a remake of a limited location foreign language film it was THE GUILTY, which I had really enjoyed. So I rented an import DVD of AMBULANCE (Ambulancen), and it fulfilled my hopes.
I actually think the Bay movie looks potentially good, and it’s obviously gonna be very different – way bigger, way more expensive, way more pretty, way more complicated, way more blowing hot air about our great military heroes and what not. Seeing the elegant economy of this one actual makes the remake trailer seem more laughable… of fucking course they saw this and said “How can we get the War on Terror in here?” (If not “How do we get them out of this ambulance?”)
But that’s fine. However that one turns out, I’m glad it led to me to this really solid movie that uses simplicity to its great advantage. It doesn’t have to be epic to be a total rush. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: bank robbery, car chases, Danish, Helle Fagralid, Laurits Munch-Petersen, Paw Henriksen, Tomas Bo Larsen, Torbjorn Hummel
Posted in Crime, Reviews, Thriller | 10 Comments »
Monday, March 28th, 2022
In 1965, when King of the Monsters Godzilla had already starred in five movies and battled Anguirus, King Kong, Mothra, King Ghidorah and Rodan, a new kaiju hit the scene, a fella by the name of GAMERA, THE GIANT MONSTER. I respect Godzilla, and I concede that he beat Gamera to waking up in the 20th century, and to starring in movies. But we’re told in this movie that Gamera is from Atlantis, and though I’m no historian I’m pretty sure that means he was around before whichever dinosaur era the puny pre-radiation Godzilla came up in. Gamera is the O.G. He’s just a late bloomer.
The Gamera movies were created by Daiei, the studio founded in 1942 that produced Akira Kurosawa’s RASHOMON, Kenji Mizoguchi’s UGETSU and SANSHO THE BAILIFF, and also the Zatoichi, Yokai Monsters and Daimajin series. This one was clearly made to compete with or cash in on Toho’s popular Godzilla series, but that’s odd because it’s a black and white movie where one monster is awakened and attacks Tokyo, not another monster. By this point Godzilla had done three color films and had been fighting other monsters for a decade. And it wasn’t as if most films were black and white then – Daiei’s own Zatoichi movies had switched to color. Was this made for people nostalgic for the original GOJIRA (which was eleven years in the past at that point)? Were they trying to make sure the world had a movie like GOJIRA but not a total bummer inspired by the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima? And is doing that kind of like how KONG: SKULL ISLAND mimics all your favorite Vietnam War movies without all the horrors-of-the-Vietnam-War darkness? Uh, not really. They were just trying to save money. More on that later. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Atlantis, Daiei, Eiji Funakoshi, Junichiro Yamashita, kaiju, Noriaki Yuasa, Yoshiro Uchida
Posted in Monster, Reviews | 9 Comments »
Thursday, March 24th, 2022
“Folks here, they don’t make no never mind who you are or what you done.”
The first shot in Guillermo Del Toro’s Depression-era noir movie NIGHTMARE ALLEY is of Bradley Cooper dragging a wrapped-up corpse into frame. It reminded me of the teaser trailer for THE HILLS HAVE EYES 2 (2007). That was not a good movie, but it was a great teaser, so when a best picture nominee reminds me of it, that’s pretty impressive. If BELFAST or THE POWER OF THE DOG started out like the legendary Lady in the Lake teaser for LEATHERFACE: TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE III they would move up a notch for me, personally.
Cooper’s character Stan is inside a small house in disrepair, and he drops the body into a hole in the floorboards, puts on his coat and hat, takes a moment to contemplate and light a cigarette, sets the place on fire and leaves. If anybody walked into the movie exactly two minutes and saw him on a bus out of town they probly spent a good chunk of the movie thinking he was a good ol’ salt of the earth everyman trying to survive day-to-day through hard, humble work. The rest of us had to watch him very unsettled, wondering what he’s up to, questioning the sincerity of everything he says or does. ‘Cause you can never fully trust a corpse dragger. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Bradley Cooper, carnival, Cate Blanchett, Clifton Collins Jr., Dan Laustsen, David Strathairn, Guillermo Del Toro, Kim Morgan, Mark Povinelli, Peter MacNeill, Richard Jenkins, Ron Perlman, Rooney Mara, Toni Collette, Troy James, Willem Dafoe
Posted in Crime, Reviews | 44 Comments »
Tuesday, March 22nd, 2022
DEADLY GAMES (1982) – not to be confused with the much better DEADLY GAMES (1989) a.k.a. DIAL CODE SANTA CLAUS – is a slasher movie that I guess was very rare on video until now. I never came across it during my Slasher Searches, but now Arrow put it out on a nice blu-ray.
This is hardly one of the greats, but you know me, I’m a scholar, and I like seeing all the different variations and permutations of the formula. This one is interesting in that it takes place in a little bit more of a world of adults than most of them. And it’s not one of those crude regional movies – for the most part the production values and acting are slick and professional. And Steve Railsback is in it! If Steve Railsback is in it it’s a real movie.
The deadly games begin when Linda Lawrence (Alexandra Morgan, THE HAPPY HOOKER GOES HOLLYWOOD) is alone in her fancy hillside house and gets creepy phone calls from a strange man (calling from a phone booth improbably located in sight of her isolated home). She’s scared, then convinces herself she’s fine. She talks to a boyfriend on the phone and tells him, “No, I don’t look like Janet Leigh” before getting in the shower. Always the PSYCHO shower scene references in these things. Anyway, a guy in a ski mask attacks her and she falls out the window. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Alexandra Morgan, Colleen Camp, Jere Rae Mansfield, Jo Ann Harris, June Lockhart, Sam Groom, Scott Mansfield, slashers, Steve Railsback
Posted in Horror, Reviews | 16 Comments »
Monday, March 21st, 2022
Would you believe I’d never seen NEMESIS (1992) before? I’d heard claims it was one of the better movies for director Albert Pyun and/or star Olivier Gruner, but I didn’t get around to it until now. From the cover I always thought it was gonna be kind of a TERMINATOR knock off, so I was very surprised and impressed when it opened seeming more like BLADE RUNNER in the style of THE KILLER.
It starts in Los Angeles, 2027 A.D., which does not look overly futuristic, but is covered in an eerie orangy brown haze. Alex Rain (Gruner, who had only been in ANGEL TOWN) is in a hotel for a liaison with a woman, but then he shoots her in the head, revealing a bunch of wires and electrodes. “God damn cop,” she says. “God damn terrorist” he replies. Though he very poorly delivers a one-liner to her exploded head, he looks very cool when he walks out of the hotel with a Chow Yun Fat style tie-overcoat-and-sunglasses look, passing a bunch of people in the hallway who take a minute to figure out he’s the cop who shot their friend. But then they follow him. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Albert Pyun, Branscombe Richmond, Brion James, Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, cyberpunk, Deborah Shelton, Jackie Earle Haley, Jennifer Gatti, Marjean Holden, Marjorie Monaghan, Olivier Gruner, Sneaky Pete Kleinow, Sven-Ole Thorsen, Thomas Jane, Tim Thomerson, Yuji Okumoto
Posted in Reviews | 23 Comments »
Thursday, March 17th, 2022
WRONG TURN (2021) was marketed as a remake of WRONG TURN (2003), but is I think either a bonafide reboot (starting over from the beginning) or un-subtitled sequel (after they dropped the original title, WRONG TURN: THE FOUNDATION). If you consider the premise of the six previous WRONG TURN movies to be “travelers are hunted by a family of deformed cannibals,” then this is not a remake. It’s more like a re-asking of the question “what if some young people got attacked in some woods in West Virginia?” that gets a different answer.
I like the structure of it. It begins with grey-haired real estate agent Scott Shaw (Matthew Modine, TRANSPORTER 2) out of his element driving through Appalachia in search of his missing daughter Jen (Charlotte Vega, AMERICAN ASSASSIN). He finds an inn that she and her friends stayed at, and only knows they meant to hike an Appalachian trail. The police chief isn’t much help and also asks “Who’s the Black fella?” when he sees her boyfriend Darius (Adain Bradley, 2 episodes of Riverdale) in a photo. Locals at a bar basically tell Mr. Shaw to give up because if she got lost in those woods she’s surely dead. Rude. But he says he’s not gonna give up. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Adain Bradley, Adrian Favela, Alan B. McElroy, Bill Sage, Charlotte Vega, Dylan McTee, Emma Dumont, Matthew Modine, Vardaan Arora
Posted in Horror, Reviews | 6 Comments »
